Word.ws English Dictionary

knock the corners off

knock the corners off verb: to accustom (a person) to the vicissitudes of life; to cure a person of naïveté, selfishness, etc. by exposure to reality.

Verb

knock the corners off (third-person singular simple present knocks the corners off, present participle knocking the corners off, simple past and past participle knocked the corners off)

  1. (ambitransitive) To accustom (a person) to the vicissitudes of life; to cure a person of naïveté, selfishness, etc. by exposure to reality.
    • That's the point. He needs a father to knock the corners off him and whip him into shape.'2007, Csilla Toldy, Desert Skies, page 133
    • […] these prefects, about ten of them, indulged any sadistic leanings they had by making our lives as difficult as possible. This was allowed to go unchecked by the staff who probably overlooked it as part of school life designed to knock the corners off.2013, Daphne Coyne, A Surfeit of Aunts, page 66

Forms of knock the corners off

third-person singular presentknocks the corners off
present participleknocking the corners off
past participleknocked the corners off
pastknocked the corners off

Questions about knock the corners off

What does knock the corners off mean?
Knock the corners off means to accustom (a person) to the vicissitudes of life; to cure a person of naïveté, selfishness, etc. by exposure to reality.
What part of speech is knock the corners off?
Knock the corners off is a verb.
What is the past tense of knock the corners off?
The past tense of knock the corners off is knocked the corners off.

Words near knock the corners off in the dictionary

  1. knock someone's head off
  2. knock someone's lights out
  3. knock someone's socks off
  4. knock someone's wind out
  5. knock the ball out of the park
  6. knock the corners off
  7. knock the daylight out of
  8. knock the daylights out of
  9. knock the living daylights out of
  10. knock the persimmon
  11. knock the stuffing out of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knock the corners off (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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